ANYTHING BUT STILL LIFE.
Penalva Court, about half a mile from the quay, is "like a house in a
story;"--a house of seven gables, and those very shaky ones; a house
of useless long passages, useless turrets, vast lumber attics where
maids see ghosts, lofty garden and yard walls of grey stone, round
which the wind and rain are lashing through the dreary darkness; low
oak-ribbed ceilings; windows which once were mullioned with stone, but
now with wood painted white; walls which were once oak-wainscot,
but have been painted like the mullions, to the disgust of Elsley
Vavasour, poet, its occupant in March 1854, who forgot that, while the
oak was left dark, no man could have seen to read in the rooms a yard
from the window.
He has, however, little reason to complain of the one drawing-room,
where he and his wife are sitting, so pleasant has she made it look,
in spite of the plainness of the furniture. A bright log-fire is
burning on the hearth. There are a few good books too, and a few
handsome prints; while some really valuable nick-nacks are set out,
with pardonable ostentation, on a little table covered with crimson
velvet. It is only cotton velvet, if you look close at it; but the
things are pretty enough to catch the eye of all visitors; and Mrs.
Heale, the Doctor's wife (who always calls Mrs. Vavasour "my lady,"
though she does not love her), and Mrs. Trebooze, of Trebooze, always
finger them over when they have any opportunity, and whisper to each
other half contemptuously,--"Ah, poor thing! there's a sign that she
has seen better days."
And better days, in one sense, Mrs. Vavasour has seen. I am afraid,
indeed, that she has more than once regretted the morning when she ran
away in a hack-cab from her brother Lord Scoutbush's house in Eaton
Square, to be married to Elsley Vavasour, the gifted author of "A
Soul's Agonies and other Poems." He was a lion then, with foolish
women running after him, and turning his head once and for all; and
Lucia St. Just was a wild Irish girl, new to London society, all
feeling and romance, and literally all; for there was little real
intellect underlying her passionate sensibility. So when the
sensibility burnt itself out, as it generally does; and when children,
and the weak health which comes with them, and the cares of a
household, and money difficulties were absorbing her little powers,
Elsley Vavasour began to fancy that his wife was a very commonplace
person, who was fast losing even her good looks and her good temper.
So, on the whole, they were not happy. Elsley was an affectionate man,
and honourable to a fantastic nicety; but he was vain, capricious,
over-sensitive, craving for admiration and distinction; and it was not
enough for him that his wife loved him, and bore him children, kept
his accounts, mended and moiled all day long for him and his; he
wanted her to act the public for him exactly when he was hungry for
praise; and that not the actual, but an altogether ideal, public; to
worship him as a deity, "live for him and him alone," "realise" his
poetic dreams of marriage bliss, and talk sentiment with him, or
listen to him talking sentiment to her, when she would much sooner be
safe in bed burying all the petty cares of the day, and the pain in
her back too, poor thing! in sound sleep; and so it befell that they
often quarrelled and wrangled, and that they were quarrelling and
wrangling this very night.
Who cares to know how it began? Who cares to hear how it went on,--the
stupid, aimless skirmish of bitter words, between two people who had
forgotten themselves? I believe it began with Elsley's being vexed
at her springing up two or three times, fancying that she heard the
children cry, while he wanted to be quiet, and sentimentalise over the
roaring of the wind outside. Then--she thought of nothing but those
children. Why did she not take a book and occupy her mind? To which
she had her pert, though just answer, about her mind having quite
enough to do to keep clothes on the children's backs, and so
forth,--let who list imagine the miserable little squabble;--till she
says,--"I know what has put you out so to-night; nothing but the news
of my sister's coming." He answers,--"That her sister is as little to
him as to any man; as welcome to come now as she has been to stay away
these three years."
"Ah, it's very well to say that; but you have been a different person
ever since that letter came." And so she torments him into an angry
self-justification (which she takes triumphantly as a confession) that
"it is very disagreeable to have his thoughts broken in on by one who
has no sympathy with him and his pursuits--and who" and at that point
he wisely stops short, for he was going to throw down a very ugly gage
of battle.
Thrown down or not, Lucia snatches at it.
"Ah, I understand; poor Valentia! You always hated her."
"I did not: but she is so brusque, and excited, and--"
"Be so kind as not to abuse my family. You may say what you will of
me; but--"
"And what have your family done for me, pray?"
"Why, considering that we are now living rent-free in my brother's
house, and--" She stops in her turn; for her pride and her prudence
also will not let her tell him that Valentia has been clothing her and
the children for the last three years. He is just the man to forbid
her on the spot to receive any more presents, and to sacrifice her
comfort to his own pride. But what she has said is quite enough to
bring out a very angry answer, which she expecting, nips in the bud
by--
"For goodness' sake, don't speak so loud; I don't want the servants to
hear."
"I am not speaking loud"--(he has not yet opened his lips). "That is
your old trick to prevent my defending myself, while you are driving
one mad. How dare you taunt me with being a pensioner on your
brother's bounty? I'll go up to town again and take lodgings there.
I need not be beholden to any aristocrat of them all. I have my own
station in the real world,--the world of intellect; I have my own
friends; I have made myself a name without his help; and I can live
without his help, he shall find!"
"Which name were you speaking of?" rejoins she looking up at him, with
all her native Irish humour flashing up for a moment in her naughty
eyes. The next minute she would have given her hand not to have said
it; for, with a very terrible word, Elsley springs to his feet and
dashes out of the room.
She hears him catch up his hat and cloak, and hurry out into the rain,
slamming the door behind him. She springs up to call him back, but
he is gone;--and she dashes herself on the floor, and bursts into an
agony of weeping over "young bliss never to return"? Not in the least.
Her principal fear is, lest he should catch cold in the rain. She
takes up her work again, and stitches away in the comfortable
certainty that in half an hour she will have recovered her temper, and
he also; that they will pass a sulky night; and to-morrow, by about
mid-day, without explanation or formal reconciliation, have become as
good friends as ever. "Perhaps," says she to herself, with a woman's
sense of power, "if he be very much ashamed and very wet, I'll pity
him and make friends to-night."
Miserable enough are these little squabbles. Why will two people, who
have sworn to love and cherish each other utterly, and who, on the
whole, do what they have sworn, behave to each other as they dare for
very shame behave to no one else? Is it that, as every beautiful thing
has its hideous antitype, this mutual shamelessness is the devil's
ape of mutual confidence? Perhaps it cannot be otherwise with beings
compact of good and evil. When the veil of reserve is withdrawn from
between two souls, it must be withdrawn for evil, as for good, till
the two natures, which ought to seek rest, each in the other's inmost
depths, may at last spring apart, confronting each other recklessly
with,--"There, you see me as I am; you know the worst of me, and I of
you; take me as you find me--what care I?"
Elsley and Lucia have not yet arrived at that terrible crisis: though
they are on the path toward it,--the path of little carelessnesses,
rudenesses, ungoverned words and tempers, and, worst of all, of that
half-confidence, which is certain to avenge itself by irritation and
quarrelling; for if two married people will not tell each other in
love what they ought, they will be sure to tell each other in anger
what they ought not. It is plain enough already that Elsley has his
weak point, which must not be touched; something about "a name," which
Lucia is to be expected to ignore,--as if anything which really exists
could be ignored while two people live together night and day, for
better for worse. Till the thorn is out, the wound will not heal; and
till the matter (whatever it may be) is set right, by confession and
absolution, there will be no peace for them, for they are living in a
lie; and, unless it be a very little one indeed, better, perhaps, that
they should go on to that terrible crisis of open defiance. It may
end in disgust, hatred, madness; but it may, too, end in each
falling again upon the other's bosom, and sobbing out through holy
tears,--"Yes, you do know the worst of me, and yet you love me still.
This is happiness, to find oneself most loved when one most hates
oneself! God, help us to confess our sins to Thee, as we have done to
each other, and to begin life again like little children, struggling
hand in hand out of this lowest pit, up the steep path which leads to
life, and strength, and peace."
Heaven grant that it may so end! But now Elsley has gone raging out
into the raging darkness; trying to prove himself to himself the most
injured of men, and to hate his wife as much as possible: though the
fool knows the whole time that he loves her better than anything on
earth, even than that "fame," on which he tries to fatten his lean
soul, snapping greedily at every scrap which falls in his way, and, in
default, snapping at everybody and everything else. And little comfort
it gives him. Why should it? What comfort, save in being wise and
strong? And is he the wiser or stronger for being told by a reviewer
that he has written fine words, or has failed in writing them; or to
have silly women writing to ask for his autograph, or for leave to set
his songs to music? Nay,--shocking as the question may seem,--is
he the wiser and stronger man for being a poet at all, and a
genius?--provided, of course, that the word genius is used in its
modern meaning, of a person who can say prettier things than his
neighbours. I think not. Be it as it may, away goes the poor genius;
his long cloak, picturesque enough in calm weather, fluttering about
uncomfortably enough, while the rain washes his long curls into swabs;
out through the old garden, between storm-swept laurels, beneath dark
groaning pines, and through a door in the wall which opens into the
lane.
The lane leads downward, on the right, into the village. He is in no
temper to meet his fellow-creatures,--even to see the comfortable
gleam through their windows, as the sailors close round the fire with
wife and child; so he turns to the left, up the deep stone-banked
lane, which leads towards the cliff, dark now as pitch, for it is
overhung, right and left, with deep oak-wood.
It is no easy matter to proceed, though, for the wind pours down the
lane as through a funnel, and the road is of slippery bare slate, worn
here and there into puddles of greasy clay, and Elsley slips back half
of every step, while his wrath, as he tires, oozes out of his heels.
Moreover, those dark trees above him, tossing their heads impatiently
against the scarcely less dark sky, strike an awe into him,--a sense
of loneliness, almost of fear. An uncanny, bad night it is; and he is
out on a bad errand; and he knows it, and wishes that he were home
again. He does not believe, of course, in those "spirits of the
storm," about whom he has so often written, any more than he does in a
great deal of his fine imagery; but still in such characters as his,
the sympathy between the moods of nature and those of the mind is
most real and important; and Dame Nature's equinoctial night wrath is
weird, gruesome, crushing, and can be faced (if it must be faced) in
real comfort only when one is going on an errand of mercy, with
a clear conscience, a light heart, a good cigar, and plenty of
Mackintosh.
So, ere Elsley had gone a quarter of a mile, he turned back, and
resolved to go in, and take up his book once more. Perhaps Lucia might
beg his pardon; and if not, why, perhaps he might beg hers. The rain
was washing the spirit out of him, as it does out of a thin-coated
horse.
Stay! What was that sound above the roar of the gale? a cannon?
He listened, turning his head right and left to escape the howling of
the wind in his ears. A minute, and another boom rose and rang aloft.
It was near, too. He almost fancied that he felt the concussion of the
air.
Another, and another; and then, in the village below, he could see
lights hurrying to and fro. A wreck at sea? He turned again up the
lane. He had never seen a wreck. What an opportunity for a poet; and
on such a night too: it would be magnificent if the moon would but
come out! Just the scene, too, for his excited temper! He will work on
upward, let it blow and rain as it may. He is not disappointed. Ere he
has gone a hundred yards, a mass of dripping oil-skins runs full butt
against him, knocking him against the bank; and, by the clank of
weapons, he recognises the coast-guard watchman.
"Hillo!--who's that? Beg your pardon, sir," as the man recognises
Elsley's voice.
"What is it?--what are the guns?"
"God knows, sir! Overright the Chough and Crow; on 'em, I'm afeard.
There they go again!--hard up, poor souls! God help them!" and the man
runs shouting down the lane.
Another gun, and another; but long ere Elsley reaches the cliff, they
are silent; and nothing is to be heard but the noise of the storm,
which, loud as it was below among the wood, is almost intolerable now
that he is on the open down.
He struggles up the lane toward the cliff, and there pauses, gasping,
under the shelter of a wall, trying to analyse that enormous mass of
sound which fills his ears and brain, and flows through his heart
like maddening wine. He can bear the sight of the dead grass on the
cliff-edge, weary, feeble, expostulating with its old tormentor the
gale; then the fierce screams of the blasts as they rush up across the
layers of rock below, like hounds leaping up at their prey; and far
beneath, the horrible confused battle-roar of that great leaguer of
waves. He cannot see them, as he strains his eyes over the wall into
the blank depth,--nothing but a confused welter and quiver of mingled
air, and rain, and spray, as if the very atmosphere were writhing in
the clutches of the gale: but he can hear,--what can he not hear? It
would have needed a less vivid brain than Elsley's to fancy another
Badajos beneath. There it all is:--the rush of columns to the breach,
officers cheering them on,--pauses, breaks, wild retreats, upbraiding
calls, whispering consultations,--fresh rush on rush, now here, now
there,--fierce shouts above, below, behind,--shrieks of agony, choked
groans and gasps of dying men,--scaling-ladders hurled down with all
their rattling freight,--dull mine-explosions, ringing cannon-thunder,
as the old fortress blasts back its besiegers pell-mell into the deep.
It is all there: truly enough there, at least, to madden yet more
Elsley's wild angry brain, till he tries to add his shouts to the
great battle-cries of land and sea, and finds them as little audible
as an infant's wail.
Suddenly, far below him, a bright glimmer;--and, in a moment, a
blue-light reveals the whole scene, in ghastly hues,--blue leaping
breakers, blue weltering sheets of foam, blue rocks, crowded with blue
figures, like ghosts, flitting to and fro upon the brink of that blue
seething Phlegethon, and rushing up towards him through the air, a
thousand flying blue foam-sponges, which dive over the brow of the
hill and vanish, like delicate fairies fleeing before the wrath of the
gale:--but where is the wreck? The blue-light cannot pierce the grey
veil of mingled mist and spray which hangs to seaward; and her guns
have been silent for half an hour and more.
Elsley hurries down, and finds half the village collected on the
long sloping point of down below. Sailors wrapped in pilot-cloth,
oil-skinned coast-guardsmen, women with their gowns turned over their
heads, staggering restlessly up and down, and in and out, while every
moment some fresh comer stumbles down the slope, thrusting himself
into his clothes as he goes, and asks, "Where's the wreck!" and gets
no answer, but a surly advice to "hold his noise," as if they had hope
of hearing the wreck which they cannot see; and kind women, with their
hearts full of mothers' instincts, declare that they can hear little
children crying, and are pooh-poohed down by kind men, who, man's
fashion, don't like to believe anything too painful, or, if they
believe it, to talk of it.
"What were the guns from, then, Brown?" asks the Lieutenant of the
head-boatman.
"Off the Chough and Crow, I thought, sir. God grant not!"
"You thought, sir!" says the great man, willing to vent his vexation
on some one. "_Why_ didn't you make sure?"
"Why, just look, Lieutenant," says Brown, pointing into the "blank
height of the dark;" "and I was on the pier too, and couldn't see; but
the look-out man here says--" A shift of wind, a drift of cloud, and
the moon flashes out a moment.--"There she is, sir!"
Some three hundred yards out at sea lies a long curved black line,
beautiful, severe, and still, amid those white wild leaping hills.
A murmur from the crowd, which swells into a roar, as they surge
aimlessly up and down.
Another moment, and it is cut in two by a white
line--covered--lost--all hold their breaths. No; the sea passes on,
and still the black curve is there; enduring.
"A terrible big ship!"
"A Liverpool clipper, by the lines of her."
"God help the poor passengers, then!" sobs a woman. "They're past our
help: she's on her beam ends."
"And her deck upright toward us."
"Silence! Out of the way you loafing long-shores!" shouts the
Lieutenant. "Brown--the rockets!"
What though the Lieutenant be somewhat given to strong liquors, and
stronger language? He wears the Queen's uniform; and what is more, he
knows his work, and can do it; all make a silent ring while the fork
is planted; the Lieutenant, throwing away the end of his cigar, kneels
and adjusts the stick; Brown and his mates examine and shake out the
coils of line.
Another minute, and the magnificent creature rushes forth with a
triumphant roar, and soars aloft over the waves in a long stream of
fire, defiant of the gale.
Is it over her? No! A fierce gust, which all but hurls the spectators
to the ground; the fiery stream sweeps away to the left, in a grand
curve of sparks, and drops into the sea.
"Try it again!" shouts the Lieutenant, his blood now up. "We'll see
which will beat, wind or powder."
Again a rocket is fixed, with more allowance for the wind; but the
black curve has disappeared, and he must wait awhile.
"There it is again! Fly swift and sure," cries Elsley, "thou fiery
angel of mercy, bearing the saviour-line! It may not be too late yet."
Full and true the rocket went across her; and "three cheers for the
Lieutenant!" rose above the storm.
"Silence, lads! Not so bad, though;" says he, rubbing his wet hands.
"Hold on by the line, and watch for a bite, Brown."
Five minutes pass. Brown has the line in his hand, waiting for any
signal touch from the ship: but the line sways limp in the surge.
Ten minutes. The Lieutenant lights a fresh cigar, and paces up and
down, smoking fiercely.
A quarter of an hour; and yet no response. The moon is shining clearly
now. They can see her hatchways, the stumps of her masts, great
tangles of rigging swaying and lashing down across her deck; but that
delicate upper curve is becoming more ragged after every wave; and the
tide is rising fast.
"There's a pull!" shouts Brown.... "No, there ain't ... God have
mercy, sir! She's going!"
The black curve boils up, as if a mine had been sprung on board, leaps
into arches, jagged peaks, black bars crossed and tangled; and then
all melts away into the white seething waste; while the line floats
home helplessly, as if disappointed; and the billows plunge more
sullenly and sadly towards the shore, as if in remorse for their dark
and reckless deed.
All is over. What shall we do now? Go home, and pray that God may have
mercy on all drowning souls? Or think what a picturesque and tragical
scene it was, and what a beautiful poem it will make, when we have
thrown it into an artistic form, and bedizened it with conceits and
analogies stolen from all heaven and earth by our own self-willed
fancy?
Elsley Vavasour--through whose spectacles, rather than with my own
eyes, I have been looking at the wreck, and to whose account, not
to mine, the metaphors and similes of the last two pages must be
laid--took the latter course; not that he was not awed, calmed, and
even humbled, as he felt how poor and petty his own troubles
were, compared with that great tragedy: but in his fatal habit of
considering all matters in heaven and earth as bricks and mortar for
the poet to build with, he considered that he had "seen enough;" as if
men were sent into the world to see and not to act; and going home too
excited to sleep, much more to go and kiss forgiveness to his sleeping
wife, sat up all night, writing "The Wreck," which may be (as the
reviewer in "The Parthenon" asserts) an exquisite poem; but I cannot
say that it is of much importance.
So the delicate genius sate that night, scribbling verses by a
warm fire, and the rough Lieutenant settled himself down in his
Mackintoshes, to sit out those weary hours on the bare rock, having
done all that he could do, and yet knowing that his duty was, not to
leave the place as long as there was a chance of saving--not a life,
for that was past all hope--but a chest of clothes, or a stick of
timber. There he settled himself, grumbling, yet faithful; and filled
up the time with sleepy maledictions against some old admiral, who
had--or had not--taken a spite to him in the West Indies thirty years
before, else he would have been a post captain by now, comfortably in
bed on board a crack frigate, instead of sitting all night out on
a rock, like an old cormorant, etc. etc. Who knows not the woes of
ancient coast-guard lieutenants?
But as it befell, Elsley Vavasour was justly punished for going home,
by losing the most "poetical" incident of the whole night.
For with the coast-guardsmen many sailors stayed. There was nothing to
be earned by staying: but still, who knew but they might be wanted?
And they hung on with the same feeling which tempts one to linger
round a grave ere the earth is filled in, loth to give up the last
sight, and with it the last hope. The ship herself, over and above her
lost crew, was in their eyes a person to be loved and regretted. And
Gentleman Jan spoke, like a true sailor--
"Ah, poor dear! And she such a beauty, Mr. Brown; as any one might see
by her lines, even that way off. Ah, poor dear!"
"And so many brave souls on board; and, perhaps, some of them not
ready, Mr. Beer," says the serious elderly chief boatman. "Eh, Captain
Willis?"
"The Lord has had mercy on them, I don't doubt." answers the old man,
in his quiet sweet voice. "One can't but hope that he would give them
time for one prayer before all was over; and having been drowned
myself, Mr. Brown, three times, and taken up for dead--that is,
once in Gibraltar Bay, and once when I was a total wreck in the old
Seahorse, that was in the hurricane in the Indies; after that when
I fell over quay-head here, fishing for bass,--why, I know well how
quick the prayer will run through a man's heart, when he's a-drowning,
and the light of conscience, too, all one's life in one minute,
like--"
"It arn't the men I care for," says Gentleman Jan; "they're gone to
heaven, like all brave sailors do as dies by wreck and battle: but the
poor dear ship, d'ye see, Captain Willis, she ha'n't no heaven to go
to, and that's why I feel for her so."
Both the old men shake their heads at Jan's doctrine, and turn the
subject off.
"You'd better go home, Captain, 'fear of the rheumatics. It's a rough
night for your years; and you've no call, like me."
"I would, but my maid there; and I can't get her home; and I can't
leave her." And Willis points to the schoolmistress, who sits upon
the flat slope of rock, a little apart from the rest, with her face
resting on her hands, gazing intently out into the wild waste.
"Make her go; it's her duty--we all have our duties. Why does her
mother let her out at this time of night? I keep my maids tighter than
that, I warrant." And disciplinarian Mr. Brown makes a step towards
her.
"Ah, Mr. Brown, don't now! She's not one of us. There's no saying
what's going on there in her. Maybe she's praying; maybe she sees more
than we do, over the sea there."
"What do you mean? There's no living body in those breakers, be sure!"
"There's more living things about on such a night than have bodies to
them, or than any but such as she can see. If any one ever talked
with angels, that maid does; and I've heard her, too; I can say I
have--certain of it. Those that like may call her an innocent: but I
wish I were such an innocent, Mr. Brown. I'd be nearer heaven then,
here on earth, than I fear sometimes I ever shall be, even after I'm
dead and gone."
"Well, she's a good girl, mazed or not; but look at her now! What's
she after?"
The girl had raised her head, and was pointing, with one arm stretched
stiffly out toward the sea.
Old Willis went down to her, and touched her gently on the shoulder.
"Come home, my maid, then, you'll take cold, indeed;" but she did not
move or lower her arm.
The old man, accustomed to her fits of fixed melancholy, looked down
under her bonnet, to see whether she was "past," as he called it. By
the moonlight he could see her great eyes steady and wide open. She
motioned him away, half impatiently, and then sprang to her feet with
a scream.
"A man! A man! Save him!"
As she spoke, a huge wave rolled in, and shot up the sloping end of
the point in a broad sheet of foam.
And out of it struggled, on hands and knees, a human figure. He looked
wildly up, and round, and then his head dropped again on his breast;
and he lay clinging with outspread arms, like Homer's polypus in the
Odyssey, as the wave drained back, in a thousand roaring cataracts,
over the edge of the rock.
"Save him!" shrieked she again, as twenty men rushed forward--and
stopped short. The man was fully thirty yards from them: but close to
him, between them and him, stretched a long ghastly crack, some ten
feet wide, cutting the point across. All knew it: its slippery edge,
its polished upright sides, the seething cauldrons within it; and
knew, too, that the next wave would boil up from it in a hundred jets,
and suck in the strongest to his doom, to fall, with brains dashed
out, into a chasm from which was no return.
Ere they could nerve themselves for action, the wave had come. Up the
slope it went, one half of it burying the wretched mariner, and fell
over into the chasm. The other half rushed up the chasm itself, and
spouted forth again to the moonlight in columns of snow, in time to
meet the wave from which it had just parted, as it fell from above;
and then the two boiled up, and round, and over, and swirled along the
smooth rock to their very feet.
The schoolmistress took one long look; and as the wave retired, rushed
after it to the very brink of the chasm, and flung herself on her
knees.
"She's mazed!"
"No, she's not!" almost screamed old Willis, in mingled pride and
terror, as he rushed after her. "The wave has carried him across the
crack and she's got him!" And he sprang upon her, and caught her round
the waist.
"Now, if you be men!" shouted he, as the rest hurried down.
"Now, if you be men; before the next wave comes!" shouted Big Jan.
"Hands together, and make a line!" And he took a grip with one hand
of the old man's waistband, and held out the other for who would to
seize.
Who took it? Frank Headley, the curate, who had been watching all
sadly apart, longing to do something which no one could mistake.
"Be you man enough?" asked big Jan doubtfully.
"Try," said Frank.
"Really, you ben't, sir," said Jan, civilly enough. "Means no offence,
sir; your heart's stout enough, I see; but you don't know what'll be."
And he caught the hand of a huge fellow next him, while Frank shrank
sadly back into the darkness.
Strong hand after hand was clasped, and strong knee after knee dropped
almost to the rock, to meet the coming rush of water; and all who knew
their business took a long breath,--they might have need of one.
It came, and surged over the man, and the girl, and up to old Willis's
throat, and round the knees of Jan and his neighbour; and then
followed the returning out-draught, and every limb quivered with the
strain: but when the cataract had disappeared, the chain was still
unbroken.
"Saved!" and a cheer broke from all lips, save those of the girl
herself; she was as senseless as he whom she had saved. They hurried
her and him up the rock ere another wave could come; but they had much
ado to open her hands, so firmly clenched together were they round his
waist.
Gently they lifted each, and laid them on the rock; while old Willis,
having recovered his breath, set to work crying like a child, to
restore breath to "his maiden."
"Run for Dr. Heale, some good Christian!" But Frank, longing to escape
from a company who did not love him, and to be of some use ere the
night was out, was already half-way to the village on that very
errand.
However, ere the Doctor could be stirred out of his boozy slumbers,
and thrust into his clothes by his wife, the schoolmistress was safe
in bed at her mother's house; and the man, weak, but alive, carried
triumphantly up to Heale's door; which having been kicked open, the
sailors insisted in carrying him right upstairs, and depositing him on
the best spare bed.
"If you won't come to your patients, Doctor, your patients shall come
to you. Why were you asleep in your liquors, instead of looking out
for poor wratches, like a Christian? You see whether his bones be
broke, and gi'un his medicines proper; and then go and see after the
schoolmistress; she'm worth a dozen of any man, and a thousand of you!
We'll pay for 'un like men; and if you don't, we'll break every bottle
in your shop."
To which, what between bodily fear and real good-nature, old Heale
assented; and so ended that eventful night.